Research Impact and Author Profiles

Tracking your publication citations is not just about numbers, it's about WHO is citing your work.  Benefits of tracking who has cited your publications include:

• Learn which researchers or institutions are following your work
• Identify possible collaborators
• Identify similar research projects
• Confirm that research findings were properly attributed and credited
• Determine if research findings were duplicated, confirmed, corrected, improved or repudiated
• Determine if research findings were extended (different human populations or animal models/species), etc.
• Quantify return on research investment
• Justify future requests for funding
• Tenure/Promotion

Use the citation alerts function in databases to be notified when someone cites your work.  This allows you to follow who is citing you and when you have been cited.  Alerts can be created for authors or specific articles and can be sent via email or RSS feed on a specified frequency (daily, weekly, monthly). 

Web of Science Citation Alerts

You can create an alert for an author or a specific article:

• Save a search query on your name as author and create an alert
• Create an alert for a specific article you authored

Link to help for creating alerts or view the Web of Science tutorial.

Google & Google Scholar Alerts

• Set up a Google Scholar Profile and create an alert to be emailed whenever any of your articles are cited
• Set up a Google Alert based on a search of your name or research area for email notification

​Track Altmetrics

Use the free Altmetric bookmarklet to track other forms of metrics (non-citations) for you published journal articles.  Drag the Bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks bar and use this for any journal article to learn of any social media activity for the selected article.

 Many individual journals track almetrics for each article. Examples include many Wiley Online Journals and the PLOS journals. The CINAHL database also uses PlumX for article metrics.